Under the mountain dark and tall
by CimentSemantique
Summary: And somewhere, in tragedy after tragedy, in an endless, inevitable train of burials, is this badass tattoo'd mohawk'd warrior who threw himself into every battle with no regard for sanity or his own safety, and who is the last of his loved ones to die.


A/N: Normally I would say that, hey, I'm working on a multichapter that shouldn't be as sad as these one-shots I've been churning out, but "Moria" is intended to be pretty heart-wrenching, too. I don't know why I have friends in this fandom.

* * *

Dori did not live long after the news of Ori's death. He was a nervous soul by nature, and distracted; it was a miracle, in truth, that he had lived as long as he had. It was maybe due to the careful cares of Nori, who in the wake of the youngest brother's departure could not bring himself to leave, as he had done so many times in his youth. Nori, whose eyes flashed in irritation every time Dori forgot where he'd put the tea. Nori, whose smile was ever stretched too widely over too tightly closed a mouth. Nori, who buried his head in Bofur's chest screaming when Dori was bedridden after falling from his stool and breaking his ankle, but refused to look anyone else in the eye afterwards.

When the news came, borne by little Gimli with his little Elf friend skulking behind him, the brothers could not look at each other. Nori could not bear to be near anything that reminded him of Ori and, for the first time in years, disappeared. Disappeared for days, Nori. Disappeared for weeks. Dori, with that limp from which he never recovered, was left wandering Ori's old study with a mug of lukewarm tea and a crumpled chin beneath his thinning beard. He had found one of Ori's old journals out of place, they thought. He was trying to put it back, they thought, on one of the top shelves, and the stool (was it that same perfidious stool?) had given way. They found the pages of the journal mucked together with tea and bleeding ink, and Dori with chips of ceramic in his beard.

Bofur found Nori in a tiny tavern in Dale, his face set and red, his eyes only barely guarded, as if he knew. As if he knew, and was pleading silently: _please, no. Not the other. Not so soon_.

Nori was brought to the healer's after the burial, covered in scrapes and burns. At the bottom of the mountain they found the charred and chopped remains of a stool.

With Bifur it had always been a matter of time - time before something loosened the ax and the wound became infected, time before the damage it had done to his mind felled him at a bad time, time before time simply caught up to him. They had expected his death for a long time, now. They had expected it since the ax. They knew it was borrowed time that was Bifur's, but they never expected it to run out on a splinter. A _splinter_, and he a master whittler! A splinter in the eye, then a great flailing and thrashing. A great flailing and thrashing, and a fall on that infernal ax-head; a fall at _just_ the wrong angle.

It was Dwalin who found himself pulling Bofur, in the throes of a fit of a kind so rare they all shivered, off the ground. He was mumbling over and again that this was the sort of death children joked about, the sort of death the comic bards made light of; this was not the sort of death that ever_truly_ happened. Not to real persons. Not to his cousin. Not Bifur, who had survived decades with a great bloody ax in his great bloody head. Not after the Goblins and the spiders and the trolls. Not after the _dragon_. _Of all the stupid things— of all the things that— this: stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid._

Nori, who recognized in his hiccuping the unspoken lament of _had I only been with him, had I only caught him_, took Bofur down to look at the water and sat with him, in silence, for hours.

Glóin had always been fortunate, and he had, looking back, the best death anyone in peace-time could have hoped for: he merely ground to a halt, warm in his bed, his wife smiling at him with her eyes just barely betraying her. He muttered something about telling Óin off for having been _eaten_, of all things. Gimli came to bid him farewell with that insufferable Elf still trailing behind him (he was not _so_ terrible, in the end, this Elf, but he had such a _smell_ to him…)

Bombur's passing, also, was gentle. His eyes had gone rheumy, certainly, and his fingers were not as nimble as once they had been, but for all the terrible things that _could_ have befallen him, he was lucky. Ill-luck must have been sated with his cousin, for between accidents in the kitchen and accidents near the mines Bombur came very close to dying in ridiculous fashions very often. As the years passed and Bofur became progressively more nervous (though, remarked Nori, he would have sooner swallowed his mattock than show it), Bombur drifted through waning life in comfort - and surprisingly unscathed - until one night death came to him in his sleep. Bofur, seeking to rouse him for breakfast the next morning, was found standing still as a stone by the bed. He did not speak until the service, and when he did, then, his voice was steady and sturdy but hollow as a drum:

"I was prepared to lose my brother to dragon's-fire. I was prepared to lose him to the spears of Goblins, the arrows of Elves, the blades of Men. In time, I came to understand I might lose him to rushing water, or to a dreadful fall, or to a senseless slip in the kitchens. I was prepared to see him die in the splendor of youth, his face alight with that rage he carried so seldom but so well. I was prepared to see him die surprised of death; resentful of death. I was not prepared to find him dead of peace. I did not expect to find him dead simply because he had grown old.

"I, too, have grown old," he finished with a whisper, and his voice trembled.

When Nori's turn came, it was not in bed, and it was not in peace. They never thought it would be, for Nori. For Ori, maybe, surrounded by his dusty books; for Dori, maybe, in his sleep, surrounded by his younger brothers (or maybe just the one, since Nori was - well, since Nori was Nori). But for Nori they had foreseen a fighting death: an old Dwarf in an inn, throwing himself into a fray, forgetting momentarily that he had in his age become frail. And Nori, bless him, had not disappointed on that front, and it was Dwalin who, breaking up the scuffle, found the old thief raving and battered on the ground. Nori had the presence of mind to ask, affronted, why Dwalin did not admonish his behavior as he carried him home; later, he had the clarity of thought necessary to scold Bofur for having become such a stick-in-the-mud in his old age.

After _that_ burial - during which Nori had no brothers to speak for him, and Bofur could not bring himself to open his mouth - Dwalin found Bofur alone by the water, his head in his hands and his braids undone. He sat, not expecting him to speak, and yet:

"What was he thinking?"

Startled, Dwalin only turned to face Bofur, who had covered his mouth with one shaking hand. "What was he _doing_?"

At length, Dwalin said, "You know Nori."

The hand against the mouth turned into a fist against the brow. "I _knew_ Nori."

The few years that remained for them were empty. Bofur had closed himself off, and Dwalin had no skill in dealing with such matters (he thought to himself several times that he _should_, but he did not); he decided, instead, to busy himself with what court matters he could still manage, to bury himself preemptively in what he could. And Bofur was wandering the mountain at night, and Bofur was wandering the woods in the winter, and before Dwalin could say something that would earn him a dirty look for mothering the other Dwarf Bofur had caught his death of cold.

Of _cold_, the insolent wanker.

Dwalin did not know the cousin who spoke for Bofur; he only knew he would not, in all the short time he had left to live, forgive himself for lacking the voice to say his own farewells.


End file.
